Category: Heather Child

Today I am sharing with you one of the reasons for not sharing your life online. This is to highlight the novel written by Heather Child and I would also like to thank her for providing the content for this post.

About The Book

Think twice before you share your life online.Freya has a new virtual assistant. It knows what she likes, knows what she wants and knows whose voice she most needs to hear: her missing sister’s.It adopts her sister’s personality, recreating her through a life lived online. But this virtual version of her sister knows things it shouldn’t be possible to know. It’s almost as if the missing girl is still out there somewhere, feeding fresh updates into the cloud. But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?

With twists and turns you’ll never see coming, Everything About You is a thrilling debut showing a chilling vision of a future that’s just around the corner. You’ll never look at your privacy settings in the same way again . . .

5 Reasons You’ll Hand Over Control To An A.I. – reason number 2

They know everything about you

Or rather, they’ll know everything about the next generation, the one that has reached adulthood in Everything About You.

Do you have friends who post pictures of their children constantly? The average five-year-old already features in around 1,500 online photos. These kids will grow up in increasingly connected homes, the ‘internet of things’ gathering data about energy use, habits and entertainment choices.

Outdoors, they’ll live in a 5G world, connecting with a device every 20 seconds on average by 2025. As in the novel, shops and billboards will categorise their facial expressions as ‘interested’ or ‘not interested’.

They’ll share information about where they are and what they are doing, in a world built for instagram (some hotels are already designing rooms to be more instagrammable). Even their bodies will not be private space, with fitbit-like wearables gathering data on heart rate and blood composition, detecting illnesses. You can already buy smart clothing like bikinis that tell the wearer when they’ve been too long in the sun and yoga pants that vibrate feedback on poses.

While it is the next generation whose identities will be curated the most thoroughly, it’s surprising how much data has already been squirreled away. How else could now-defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica have confidently created tens of thousands of adverts that played on people’s ‘inner demons’?

All of this helps make identities more detachable, and in the world of Everything About You they are easy to buy, sell and modify.